Or this whole story could be spun by British military operatives in Ireland. English papers are full of that from ‘Irish correspondents’. Or, as ireland doesn’t have significant military intelligence in the first place they are getting this “shared” from US sources. While this may be, possibly, true I have never found any reason, ever, for taking the word of military intelligence or “security experts” in the media at face value.
Ever. From any country. Military intelligence is not on your side.
If they ever tell what they think is the truth it’s a slip of the tongue or they can’t think of a story which better suits their purpose at that time.
From a traditional point of view this could be a step preceding a hot war. Severing cables is very easy to deny, and the Russian playbook is 1)Deny; 2)Blame someone else; and 3)Deny some more. It’s not a war crime if you didn’t get caught doing it.
For most other nations that would attack the West, they have no realistic hope of defeating the US in a traditional war. But cable cutting may be feasible as a terrorist-style or disruptive attack, and they could claim a propaganda victory. This might be especially appealing to the “send you all back to my religion’s Stone Age” set.
What stops them today is vigilance in guarding the cable terminals, and armoring the cables until they pass beneath amateur scuba depth. The cables themselves are apparently very hard to find in the open ocean. But many cables travel under bays and along shallower straits; these are often damaged by ships dragging their anchors. These would probably be the first to be destroyed, should someone have the desire.
One of the first things the UK did at the outbreak of World War I was to cut five of the German cables running through the English Channel towards Vigo forcing traffic to be routed through a single cable which was under British control as part of the ‘All-Red Line’ where it could be intercepted and decoded.
By contrast the UK had 49 different cables, a massive superiority in cable laying and repair and a navy to defend them.
But none of those 49 cables connected Finland to Norway.
Beurling’s accomplishment in cracking the T52 was remarkable in that he did it all alone (no Bletchley Park infrastructure) using pencil and paper. (I assume he was building on the British Enigma work, though I don’t know how much that was known.) The T52 was cracked independently in Bletchley 2 years after Beurley’s success. (By mathematician Bill Tutte, better known in my circles for inventing a big chunk of Combinatorics.)
